OCR Reviews
13,658 Reviews

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 review

$99 (around £61)

Manufacturer: ABBYY

Our Rating: We rate this 3 out of 5

By | PC World | 02 March 11

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 is a nice little Optical Character Recognition program for converting scanned images into editable word processing documents. Not as nice as the professional version, which has an updated and more effective recognition engine, but still darned good OCR - especially for the price.

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 is a nice little OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software program for converting scanned images into editable word processing documents. Not as nice as the professional version, which has an updated and more effective recognition engine, but still darned good OCR - especially for the price.

Related Articles

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 is extremely easy to use. A new tasks dialog pops up when you first run the program presenting you with the most common tasks: scanning to PDF, opening images for OCR, etc. There's also a pane the shows you the things you're missing by not owning the professional version, such as proofing and editing, better OCR, conversion to editable PDF, etc. Thankfully, you can hide that pane and get on with your business.

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 supports output to normal PDF, rich text format, Excel, and HTML. Conspicuously missing is Microsoft Word's .doc and .docx formats. In my hands-on with about 20 different scanned images of documents, FR 9 Express did a very nice job recognizing normal text - virtually flawless. It was also effective grabbing text from challenging graphics - at least with 300 dpi documents. It failed completely with a couple of difficult 150 dpi scans that the professional version and its competitors were able to render into text, instead leaving them as images.

NEXT: our expert verdict >>

Abbyy FineReader Express 9 Expert Verdict »
Post Review
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
1Ghz CPU, 512MB system memory, 250MB hard drive space
  • Overall: We give this item 6 of 10 overall

If you don't have anything particularly challenging to scan, and aren't worried about creating editable PDFs, then FR 9 Express will do the job. If you need to reconstruct more complex documents accurately, you'll need to spend more money for one of the pro-level solutions: Adobe Acrobat X Pro, Abbyy FineReader 10 Professional, or Omnipage 17 Professional.

There are currently no price comparisons for this product.
  • ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Professional

    ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Professional

    ABBYY FineReader 7.0 was a pretty good OCR (optical character recognition) product that garnered respectable reviews in 2003. The latest version, FineReader 8.0 Professional, takes something good and makes it even better.

  • ABBYY FineReader 9.0 OCR software

    ABBYY FineReader 9.0 OCR software

    Users needing an OCR program to handle a large number of documents will appreciate ABBYY FineReader 9.0.

  • ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition review

    ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition

    ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition has some interface flaws, but there's no arguing the quality of its OCR, i.e. turning scanned images into editable digital documents. And since it does what it does so well, I'll give it a pass on how it gets there.

  • Plustek OpticBook 3800 review

    Plustek OpticBook 3800

    The Plustek OpticBook 3800 is a fast-and-accurate scanner, with good OCR software.

  • Fujitsu fi-6130Z

    Fujitsu fi-6130Z

    The Fujitsu fi-6130Z is the latest salvo in the battle between Canon and Fujitsu to create the best desktop office sheet-fed scanners.

Share this article

Related Products


Comments

Send to a friend

Email this article to a friend or colleague:

PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.